The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere ...in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The world of animals in captivity offers us at once a prophetic glimpse and a caricature of the world in which modern man lives ou...t his life. The animal suffers psychologically and his suffering is not unlike that of man himself, since its world is characterized by deterioration of its environment and by its own degradation. The causes are the same in both cases: the increase in the number of individuals occupying a limited amount of space and the necessity for existing in a society in conflict with nature. Just as men occasionally reject society and retreat into a misanthropic solitude which sometimes impels them to murder, so, too, animals in a zoo--baboons, for example--suffer from, and are deformed by, lack of sufficient space for them to lead a harmonious social existence. When captivity has done its work and an animal has become truly dangerous, it then becomes necessary to isolate it in a cage of its own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Batteryto holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and... childrenbrought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain and drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The surprise of animals... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if ma...n was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

America has a history of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency; its citizens have tended to regard the rest of the wor...ld as a disaster area from which lucky or pushy people emigrate to the Promised Land. Alternatively, they think of other nations as mere showplaces for picturesque scenery, odd flora and fauna and quaint artifacts. The American tourist abroad therefore wears clothes suitable for a trip to a disaster area, or for a visit to a museum or zoo: comfortable, casual, brightly colored, relatively cheap: not calculated to arouse envy or pick up dirt. Britain, on the other hand, remains in imagination a world empire. Its citizens go abroad as representatives of the Top Nation, concerned to uphold its reputation and present a good example to lesser races. Britons therefore dress up rather than down for travel, whatever the local conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

...there was the annual Fourth of July picketing at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. ...I thought it was ridiculous to have to g...o there in a skirt. But I did it anyway because it was something that might possibly have an effect. I remember walking around in my little white blouse and skirt and tourists standing there eating their ice cream cones and watching us like the zoo had opened.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-car...ds when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »